When it came to being a dog, this world wasn't any different from our own. Don't pull on your chain, don't bite your master, do as they tell you, and wait in the doghouse until next time they whistle.

But it felt like a joke, the things they had us doing. Parading around like poodles, guarding empty buildings from nonexistent burglars. In the Old Earth, I'd fought, hell, I'd survived a war which killed the whole damn planet, and years after that. If we got lazy or complacent, we died. Compared to that, everything in this world seemed so tame.

Didn't help that despite that leg up I should have had on the rest of the guys, I felt like I was damn useless anyway, because of how I got in.

Apparently since our little escape, the robots have been trickling in through the same clothing store we showed up in, and proceeded to fly around making a nuisance of themselves, telling townsfolk to surrender and stay put until security arrives. Security never arrives, people get shot, basically the same thing that happened to Lettie.

Once they found out, XPCA set up a monitoring station, and promptly had a huge dick waving contest with the FBI, Army, NSA, and God-knows who else. Bunch of dumb assholes who didn't know how to share a foxhole when mortars are falling. But since XPCA got there first, they got first dibs on the robots coming through, and as it turned out, the tech from our world was completely new to these guys.

Which I guess wasn't surprising given some of the things we'd seen. Still couldn't believe they shot laser guns here, or have a giant space laser system. Not sure if it was the coolest damn thing, or scary as hell thinking that it could turn me into a stain on the tarmac faster than I could blink, and it was in the hands of those medal-polishing jerkoffs.

But to help reverse-engineer it, they wanted Celia, and that beautiful fucking bitch for some goddamned unknown reason said she wouldn't take the job unless they hired me on as well as a personal bodyguard or something. So now we were a consultant and a contractor, the two most goddamn overpaid job titles in this world or any other. She pulled aparts robots and showed things to people, and I got passed around more than a veggie MRE.

I appreciated the job, definitely appreciated the paycheck she'd somehow negotiated for me, and absolutely appreciated the fact she was trying to keep within arm's reach. For a while there it felt like we might slip away from each other with this whole new world to fall into, but something about being away from her just felt wrong. We were the last two people on Earth, dammit. So unless I was just reading too deep into an act of kindness on her part, I guess she felt the same.

Still, we weren't exactly close.

Off-duty at last after my three-day shift, I went by the main tent to say hi. We had our own tent city set up here now, not enough buildings in Haydn to be a real city, so we just built our own. I stopped outside the secure rooms in the tent, watching her through a clear plastic window while some other jackass watched me like I was going to make trouble, like I wasn't the guy just sitting in that security office a few hours ago.

I watched her work for a bit. Lab coat suited her, big rimless rectangle glasses which just looked like a bridge floating on her nose, suited her. Brown hair still tied up in severe bun.

I wasn't sure that suited her. I felt like the only times I ever saw her really alive was when she had her hair down. First thing in the morning, fresh out of the shower, the one night we spent together. The rest of the time she was such an uptight bitch about everything, or she was so caught up in 'thinking'.

She seemed totally lost in her work. Just really going at it, whatever it was. Buncha junk on a table from my point of view, but from the look on her face, you'd think it was a brand new M7 with an under-barrel grenade launcher, just waiting to be put together.

I wound up watching for a few minutes, just kind of soaking in her presence, feeling...not exactly happy, but something inside me. We had a weird relationship, not really one I think that can or could ever exist again. Eventually the jack-stand on duty told me not to stand around, and I told him he was a ripe asshole and left.

Back to the barracks tent, I guess. Like a regular barracks wasn't depressing enough, nothing felt more like home than portable white walls, low ceilings, and buzzing lights.

I moped around long enough to sigh and started to head back when I heard the sound of the fans blowing and the clean room door open inside. A second later, Celia popped out of the tent.

"Ajax?" she said.

"Hey."

"I heard you cussing out the guard. Why didn't you just say hi instead?"

"You looked busy. I didn't really have much to say, so I didn't want to interrupt."

"Well, look at you being thoughtful."

"Don't get used to it."

"Oh I know."

"Celia, have you eaten today?" I asked bluntly.

"Of course." She pushed her glasses up her nose with a vague sense of superiority and then went quiet and still as she got lost in her thoughts for a second.

"Uh huh." Honestly, I'd spent too long with this woman. "And let me guess, right now you're trying to figure out what, and when."

"Shh, thinking," she said, reflexively, and I beaned her gently on the head to snap her out of it. "Hey!"

"If you have to think about it, it wasn't recent enough. Come on, you're going to die if you never eat."

"It's not the old world, you know, I can eat whenever I want to."

"And you had the bad habit back then of never eating, and you have the same bad habits here," I said, and linked my arm with hers to drag her towards the mess hall.

"I don't need you taking care of me, you know," she said, a few minutes later. Much of the sting of her pout was taken out by the obvious gusto with which she was devouring a bowl of chili mac.

"And I didn't need you finding me this job or twisting my arm into it. You put it as a condition for them to hire you, and they're the goddamn feds, Celia. I couldn't say no if I wanted to."

She frowned. "I wasn't finished. I don't need it, but I appreciate it. But if it's a huge inconvenience for you--"

"If anything, it's too easy. This world got it right in a lot of ways. They just wiped out the Sinos, washed their hands, and reported back for duty on Monday."

"Ajax! That's billions of people we're talking about."

"You really think you can call the Sinos people after what they did?"

"Yes, Ajax, I do. They were people who were horrible and killed billions--"

"Which makes you into something less than a person--"

"--but if you forget they were people, you run the risks of having it happen again. You don't see something similar in this world, Ajax? These Exhumans they call them, people just like to pretend they were never people, just kill them because it's convenient."

"And because they're dangerous. You remember what that kid, Sgt. Chair did, right? Like a goddamn demon, he and his buddies were."

"You don't think that kind of total hostility is going to force a war at some point?"

"A war with who? Like I said, this world got it right. They saw the Sinos, and they wiped them out. They see the Exhumans, and they're wiping them out. That's why we're still sitting on American soil instead of ash."

She shook her head. "Back in the old world, we thought we could wipe out all the Sino's nukes and we were wrong. Here, feels more to me like every Exhuman is born with a nuke in their hands."

"Well, what the hell should I do about it? I'm just a guard dog."

She frowned again and pushed her glasses back up her nose. "I didn't...I didn't mean you. Sorry. I'm just worried."

I fell heavily back into my seat. "About losing this world, too?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, me too."

We sat in silence for a sec before I thought that was stupid and went up to get both of us another bowl of chow.

"So how's work?" I asked a nice safe subject as I sat down and put the food in front of us. "And in English, please." She'd just opened her mouth to speak, and reconsidered. It wasn't that safe a subject.

"Good, I guess. The drones are massively complex, and you know I was a defense scientist, but chemistry, not robotics. Turns out this world has quantum computing, and has for a long, long time. Still, their tech is only a little ways ahead of ours in robotics because of all the leaps we made in predictive AI, which--to keep it in English, made our slow computers as fast as their quantum computers."

"I think I almost understood some of that."

"Progress is progress."

"Isn't a quantum thingy just mean physics?"

"No, it…" she started trying to explain a few times noiselessly, her hands starting and stopping gestures as she searched for a way to dumb down Einstein to my level.

"Yeah, okay never mind," I said. "What I do understand is AI was a lot better in our world than theirs?"

"Yes. Very much so. Apparently they did have a sentient AI way back in the annals of the XPCA, but it got blown away by an Exhuman event before it could help them cross the technology singularity...that is, the point where machines become smart enough that we can use them to start making even smarter machines. This world never hit that point, ours did."

"Huh." Seemed crazy. On every single op we ever ran, it seemed like at least a third of our combat strength was armed, intelligent drones, not too different from the crazy bastards that still pop out of the clothing store every once in awhile. I guess in this world, they just sent people and only people to fight.

Well, people and Exhumans now, with Sgt. Chair and his buddies.

"So without getting too much into the politics, because I don't know much and you don't care, but that's why every branch of the government, and every private sector wants these robots. First person to reverse-engineer them and cross the singularity will have a monopoly on, hell, everything in the world you can put an AI into."

"Disgusting. Is that all our world was for? A few lines of code in a robot somewhere is the only thing our entire world produced?"

She smiled and put her hand on mine for just a moment. "Not the only thing."

She went back to shovelling food in her mouth, and I just had to wonder, when the hell had Celia started channelling Lettie.

We talked for a while longer, if you could call it that. Time I spent with Celia was in a constant state of what I thought of as combative agreement. Given that, at the end of the day, we usually agreed on the big stuff, I wasn't sure why we spent so much time picking at each other. It was exhausting and annoying.

But also apparently fun, if the adage was true. We were surprised when she got a message on her personal holo asking if she was coming back, and somehow two hours had flown by without our notice. No wonder I was so damn tired, and she had to get back to it.

"Hey, sorry for wasting your evening like that," I said, as we headed different directions outside the mess hall, pausing half-turned and a few paces apart to say an awkward farewell.

"No, I...really needed the break, I think. Besides, as my bodyguard, you're just doing your job, right? Saving me from that empty stomach's attempt on my life."

"Yeah, just doing my job," I echoed. She smiled and nodded and headed off, leaving me watching her back. Just doing my job.

A few days later, I really was just doing my job. Another fucking drone had popped out in that clothing store, now boarded up, empty, and surrounded, and we were trying to take this one whole.

Unsure of how much shielding the drone had, the eggheads had set up a series of emitters inside which would blast it with larger and larger EMPs until it fried, and then we'd move in to secure it. Just put little handcuffs on its mounted guns and read it its rights, I guess.

It had been in there for a few hours before the operation started. Just like back in the labs in the old world, the little shit was pissed, slamming its floating metal body into the doors and windows from the inside like a battering ram with the persistence of a LMG.

There was some risk of it damaging equipment inside in its angry little tantrum, so our timeline kept getting pushed up, and now here we were, at the exact moment when the advancing deadlines met the present, helmet buckled to my head, the familiar weight of a weapon in my hands.

It wasn't a real weapon. Some XPCA toy that didn't even shoot bullets, or even lasers. But oh well. Whatever it was, it had a trigger and a stock. I felt better just holding it.

There were two soldiers directly on either side of the door, holding what looked like a plain wide rectangle with a handle in the middle, dressed with yellow augmenting the XPCA black. At a word from our CO, each of them lit their rectangles, which flared to life with an orange translucent barrier that moved with them and extended from their feet to a foot over their heads, and about ten feet wide.

Shieldbearers, they were called. Handy tech, not dissimilar to stuff we had in the old world, though how they got it so portable I didn't know. The barrier was one-way, meaning we could shoot through it and the drone couldn't shoot us, as long as we stayed behind it. That was how we were getting in there without getting dead.

With a countdown, the door opened, and both shieldbearers filed in, holding position to let us enter behind them. The remaining six of us entered, three behind each shield, and the door slammed shut and locked again.

Eight guys, six guns, two shields, and a pissed-off drone. Not bad odds.

As soon as the shieldbearers were in the room, their barriers flared orange and sparks bounced as the drone poured bullets uselessly into them with a stream of fire that sounded more like whining than individual shots, but the barriers held, glowing a little whiter.

Abruptly there was a crackling semicircle of energy, emitted from a device on the floor, which swelled like a bubble. The drone dipped in the air as the EMP washed over it, but remained up, and the barriers hissed angrily but protected us as the blue crackling haze flowed around us.

A second later, another pulse, and then another after that, each one louder and crackling with more energy. After the third, the drone dipped, and then fell to the ground like it had just fallen asleep.

Probably a good thing, too, the barriers looked like they were glowing white and beginning to splutter at this point from all the electrical garbage they were soaking up.

We moved to secure the unit, half of us on each side of it with our two specialists working to dump its ammo cache. After a few minutes of whirring of electric drivers, the room filled with the sound of metallic rain when hundreds of unspent rounds abruptly fell out of the thing's bottom, clattering across the ground everywhere.

I kept my feet right where they were, but one of the specialists took a surprised step backwards and immediately slipped on the loose ammo underfoot, scrambling another step before falling painfully on his tailbone.

As though stirred awake by the crash and subsequent swearing as the specialist's buddy tried to pull himself to his feet, the drone whirred and launched itself back into the air with a thin trail of blue plasma in its wake, and menacingly clicked at us, its guns having nothing left to fire.

It would have been funny if the drone wasn't so smart and immediately started dive-bombing us instead. It began to swoop at the two specialists, rocketing its metal death ball of a body towards their unshielded bodies. I knew from experience how deadly a diving drone could be, had lost survivors that way in the past, even through armor.

I shouldered my rifle and pulled the trigger, seeing nothing but a ripple of air move forward, but the drone reacted like it'd been told to shut up and sit down by its angry drone mama, and fell silent once again.

Research team would probably be mad at me for that one. We were told only to fire if necessary, and leave the EMP to disable it without extensive damage, but I didn't much care. It was in one piece, wasn't it?

After an hour of getting my ass chewed out, it was pretty apparent that no, it wasn't. In the words of my superior, 'if they wanted a useless piece of shit, they would have the research team dissecting me instead.' And 'the mission would have gone better if they used me to soak up bullets instead of the 'bearer's barriers, because then at least it would have been obvious why I was even in the goddamn room to begin with,' along with some other choice lines.

When I got out, Celia was waiting for me, seated uncomfortably on a folding chair outside of the office. We were in an office in the little public library which had been taken over along with every other nearby building for our camp, but even out of the tents, I doubted she had too much trouble picking up most of the words said in the office. My CO hadn't exactly been quiet in his berating, after all.

"I was thinking--" she said.

"Somehow not a surprise."

"Was thinking that, if I were Lettie, I'd have barged in there and ripped that guy a new asshole," she finished.

"Maybe. For how sweet she was on everyone, she scared even me sometimes." I had to laugh.

"The drone was fine anyway, we got what we needed. He's just yelling at you to be a jerk."

"He's just yelling at me for disobeying orders. Really not that unreasonable."

"But everything turned out fine, so what's the problem?"

"You and Lettie never quite understood the importance of rigid discipline."

"And you never understood the importance of getting results instead of doing everything by the book."

"I got plenty of results. I kept us alive for three years--"

"We all kept us alive for three years. It's not like I'm an armless, legless piece of meat."

"Well, by the way you had me out scavenging sometimes while you ladies guarded the camp or whatever, it's not like I could tell--"

We sniped back and forth at each other like always, and I think I began to realize why. Three years after the end, she and Lettie and I had lived together, constantly, each of us putting in everything we had to keep everyone alive and moving. We ate, slept, lived, and died together. When one of us was hurt or sick, the others pushed themselves twice as hard. Despite the bickering, we always heard each other out, always respected each other, we trusted each other maybe even more than we trusted ourselves.

And now one leg on the stool was gone. The balance was broken, and after each of us leaning on the others so much, for so long, we didn't know who we were anymore.

Celia wasn't the only one who'd been forgetting to eat recently. Without Lettie around, both of us were pouring ourselves into our work, but neither of us knew how to stop and take care of ourselves. It was why I kept stopping by the research tent, and why Celia was waiting for me in the library; if we weren't working, we'd just go home and lay in bed and wait for work to start again.

It was really pretty shit when you thought about it. We got away from a world where we had to kill ourselves just to stay alive, and now we didn't know how to do anything but kill ourselves. You could take the survivors out of the post-apocalyptic ruins of America, but couldn't take the post-apocalyptic ruins of America out of the survivors, as they say.

We were back at the barracks, where she was going to let me go. Again, seemed like time passed faster around this woman than possible anywhere else. I didn't want to let her go just yet, didn't want to let her slip away again.

"Well, I'll see you around, I guess," she said, with a vague wave and a half-frown.

"Yeah."

We stood there like awkward idiots for a minute while she fiddled with a button on her coat, and then with a brief nod, I turned into the tent.

I had some very urgent laying in a bunk and staring at the ceiling to attend to, and didn't want to be distracted, I supposed.